Tea with Percy

From Great North Road

By Marion Murphy.

I remember when Sir Stewart Gore-Brown's daughter married Major Harvey and moved into the farm next door to us in Chisamba, (what is next door anyway .. about twelve miles?).

The ladies usually had a way of inviting any newcomer into the district for tea, as a sort of getting-to-know-you and welcome party. However, no one wanted to invite her since she was "upper crust". Eventually my mother said it was ridiculous and she decided to invite them. We were dispatched with an invitation, which we took on horseback. It was a bit muddy and whoever was in the back was getting muddy, so a bit of a race developed since everyone wanted to be in front and free of the mud. There were six of us, and since no one was ever in front the whole way, we arrive VERY mud bespattered. However, we were duly invited to get off the horses and come in for tea.

After "tea" we departed and the horses had been munching on the lawn, which was newly laid turf (where did they GET that) that had not rooted yet, so the lawn was totally destroyed.

In light of this mom thought it smart to have us all visit the Makenzies the day they were due for tea. Problem being that before we left, no one remembered to put our pet pig, a HUGE white Landlace named Percy, away. (Percy was supposed to have been bacon, but once we gave him a name and house trained him, turning him into bacon became a problem). While mom was welcoming the guests to the front door, Percy sneaked in through the kitchen, and was sitting in the sitting room as she walked in the door with Mrs Harvey. Can you imagine, trying to impress the upper crust, and there was a huge pig in the sitting room.

If my mom had shrieked and thrown her hands up like this was an unusual occurrence perhaps she could have blamed the servants or something, but I am afraid that yelling "Percy, GET OUT, you know you are NOT allowed in the house!" kind of implied that he was often there.

Mom could not get him out without our help, and we were at the neighbours, so they ended up drinking tea across the body of a huge begging pig!

They were good neighbours though. When we had a very bad fire once, they came over with their boys and water tanks and managed to divert the fire from going through the home and dairy. That was horribly scary. I was about five and my brother seven. Mom could not leave us at home because the house was in the line of the fire. She had us in our old Isis, and had parked it, she thought, out of range of the fire, while every man, woman child old enough to wield a wet sack were beating at the flames. As it happened there was a backdraft and the flames surrounded us in the car. Having driven the tractor from on dad's lap, (yes, I know, very dangerous) Rory decided the safest thing was to drive through the flames, since we had just seen a porcupine family caught in the flames and killed, we knew we could not run fast enough to get out. He did it too. Too short to reach over the steering wheel, not knowing how to change gears, he started it, pushed it into whatever gear it would go, and floored the accelerator before releasing the clutch. We hit some dongas so hard that I remember crashing my head on the roof! Obviously we made it though!